Turning Japanese

Here is page 1! In case you couldn’t tell, it was drawn by me. When and how will Rawr come into this? Wait and see.

So this is one of the most simply written comics we’ve done. When Alex and I sat down to write some of these Famous in Japan Alex commented that if we did things are normal way we’d spend the whole one-off getting them to Japan. Then I suggested we should just do one comic where Rosenstein tells the Lone Wolf he’s going to Japan…and Alex wrote this. I thought it was pretty short, but we both agreed it was fine.

So when it came time to draw it I had a lot of options. I thought it would be funny to see a more straight man, bored/annoyed Lone Wolf for once. He is quite reserved here compared to how wacky he usually is. So Rosenstein is the wacky one here, but even he is sick of the Lone Wolf’s stupidty in that middle panel. I also wanted to bring back the idea that the Lone Wolf loves technology and likes to tweet and text. The phone use combined with the cafe setting was supposed to instill in the reader what a Hollywood yuppy the Lone Wolf has become, and make it an even bigger deal that he was going to be leaving.

See, I put thought into everything, even the ridiculous. Another thing about this comic, for whatever reason I didn’t really feel like drawing it at the time, so that may also account for the grumpier tone of the characters. I drew it pretty quickly too, in one morning pretty much. Not to say I didn’t put my full effort in. I did. Just fast.

Let’s talk about that cafe setting for a second. I didn’t draw it. At first I tried to come up with something simple to give the feel I was looking for, but I had some trouble. And as I often do I scoured the internet for reference photos. Even those weren’t yielding the exact results I was looking for. Then I found this picture. I really liked it, and thought instead of recreating it in a drawing I’d just try manipulating the photo.

Careful readers will know that I’ve used photos in Famous and Black Snow sparingly over the years, but never as a background. So I resized the picture, cropped it to show what the two panel camera angles would should, played around with some painterly effects, changed a couple things then blurred it. And I really like the way it turned out.

As far as the bottom panel background, I reused that wonderful Japan imagery from the site background as I thought it would look really good radiating from Rosenstein and emphasize what he was saying.

So there you go, a long explanation for what in many ways was a super simple comic. Look forward to page 2!